IT WAS the late media guru Marshall McLuhan who coined the saying ''the medium is the message'' as a way of describing the explosion of new forms of communication in the 1960s.
If McLuhan had been in Hong Kong last week he might have altered the quotation to read something like ''the message is in the mode of the massage'' after hearing the accounts of two court cases involving members of the Correctional Services Department (CSD) and what is more coarsely known as ''a little bit of the old rub-a-dub.'' In the first case, Joseph Ng King-ho, a 32-year-old after-care officer at the Lai King Training Centre, was acquitted on charges of using his position to try to solicit a massage from the 17-year-old girlfriend of an inmate, Chau Chi-hung. This was despite what the magistrate described as ''ample evidence'' he had taken advantage of his role as the officer in charge of Chau's case to try to obtain a massage.
Not so lucky was an unnamed trainee CSD officer, 24, who appealed against a conviction for touching a female colleague's buttocks and abdomen outside a training ground. Justice Mortimer rejected the appeal and upheld the conviction for indecent assault, and with it an $800 fine with $600 costs.
The two cases have some broad similarities. Both men were in the CSD, and both thrust their attentions on to women who clearly did not want them.
But the results of the cases are very different, begging the question, when is a massage, or a demand for one, just a massage and when does it become a case of sexual assault, attempted or otherwise? An important legal distinction to be drawn is that the accused should not have been seen to have enjoyed the proceedings.
Ng seems to have been in deadly earnest when he made it clear to Chau's girlfriend, Lam Sui-mui, that she would have a lot of trouble seeing and communicating with her boyfriend in jail unless she massaged the officer, since it was his job to vet the suitability of visitors. HE TOLD her this information after picking her up at home one evening, taking her first to a Wan Chai hotel coffee shop, then to The Peak and after that to a karaoke lounge. At this point Lam asked to be taken home.
Ng, maybe with McLuhan's amended words on his mind, then drove her to Kowloon Tong where he asked for a massage to help him sleep as he had a headache. When Lam refused, he told her she could not write to Chau anymore, and it would take seven to eight months before her application to visit him could be processed.
